“Only by despairing, and then despairing of despair, can mankind begin truly to see and to act consciously in the service of the marvelous. This preliminary violation of the rules prepares the way for an entirely new game, our game, know as subversion, sublime love, the exaltation of freedom.”
– Lighthouse of the Future Manifesto, Chicago Surrealist Group, 1974
A well know fact today: Empire is burning. Empire is bleeding out. Is it the plastic chicken, or is it the stone hare? Do we skin it, or do we pluck?
Chile and Iraq. Lebanon and Catalonia. We watch, we feel ecstatic before this renewal. This fresh harvest of riot. She is joyful-despairing, she is uncalculated and unplanned. From every conceivable gap in the pavement, she escapes. Beneath the deepest cut of society’s knife, she overflows. She is sticky-sweet, uncompromising. The exact percentage of her parts, the exact mixture? Unknown. The future of her, the placesheisrunningtowards? Also unknown. So be it. The revolution will remain alchemical.
Observations. I drag my lazy work-sucked corpse to South Bend Commons. A very difficult thing to do in this day and age. In the age of the hikikomori scroll, in the time of the Netflix accumulators. South Bend Commons is an anarchist hub in Atlanta, and tonight there’s a pretty large crowd. Someone is giving a talk on Black Lives Matter. The powerpoint has some good points, and the riot porn is quite delicious. A woman with a large black dog suddenly walks in. So it’ll be a trickster spirit tonight then, eh? An emissary of Hecate? This is the second time that this has happened to me at one of these things. The other time, that was at a lecture up in Asheville. A dog had appeared as if from nowhere, and had waltzed right up to the speaker, breaking an old human taboo. Dog had disposed of the hierarchy inherent within all stages, a true revolutionist. He had also shifted the audience’s attention away from the merely-human, reframing the narrative with a fresh eye directed towards Kingdom Animalia. Dog had sniffed here and there on the stage, Dog had looked back at us all expectantly with two sadwonderful eyes. Maybe he’d given us a speech then, somekindof rousing call for liberation? It was hard to tell, none of us had spoken the dog-language at the time, or even owned a translator. In any case, we should all learn to listen more to the revolutionary wisdom of animals. Of that I am thoroughly convinced. But back to Atlanta. There is a call for a break. Friends gather, smokers smoke. A woman goes to the toilet. She finishes up, washes her hands. She attempts to open that old bathroom door. Fuckit. The bastard door is jammed. Won’t open. She’s stuck. Concerned anarchists gather round, forming plans for her jailbreak. They work collectively, attempting various actions. I remain a bemused spectator, however, patting away at the dark furry head of Hecate’s emissary. He whispers to me, he tells me a few little canine jokes while we wait. Tells me that he’s a reformed Trotskyist, that he’d only ever joined them cuz he’d like being called “Trot”. It just had made the most sense to him at the time, you know, it had sounded real nice and doggy. But now he was a tiqqunist, this sweet little pup, cuz he liked it intellectually rough, and had a thing for a certain french poodle down the street. Unfortunately my translation receiver is very subpar, however, yes indeed, and so this fun doggy monologue soon drifts back to the old Bark Bark. I don’t mind. It’s comforting. A few minutes pass, maybe ten. The anarchists continue their work on the old bastard door. Many failed attempts are made, but soon they realize something. A new plan, then. They have decided to drop bathroom-girl a screwdriver of her very own, they can drop it down from a gap in the ceiling. Yes, apparently this ceiling has many gaps and holes nested inside it. This building is a bit fucked, actually. Anyhow, it seems that now she can get herself out—from the inside! Brilliant. See, this would never had been possible in some fancy bougieland setting, because there never would have been any holes or any gaps with which to drop down the necessary tools of the escape. Her jailbreak would have then been forever-postponed. She would have led a very sad, a very miserable sort of life there in that bathroom. Day after depressingly empty day passing by inside of that tiny, stinking box, with only a few sleazy rats and the energetic SWOOSH of the flushed toilet to keep her company. It’s sad stuff, my friend, heady stuff. Like something out of an overblown Russian novel. But let’s move on from those unfortunate what-might-have-beens. Let’s breed our paragraph’s conclusion. What’s it all amount to, then? What is the meaning behind all these careless, squirming words?
Just this; it is always through a communion with the broken, with the totally useless that we have found a path to Marvelous Escape. In is only through the cracks in the walls that the revolution will appear.
Observations. Capitalism is a bloated red ballon. It is a life devouring ballon, it is a great phallus of stupidity. Along its tight, erect rubberskin there can be seen the faces of Great Fear. The thousands, the millions, of trademarked Disney characters. Digitally-printed, Walmart-sold. 2019; this is the Aeon of Mickey Mouse.
Over the last century this red ballon of capitalism has grown quite large. It has quickly, stubbornly expanded. And all this growth has been processed by the hidden (the notsohidden) automationchild. A petulant one, he is. The true behind-it-all, the conspiracy-king. Today this Überchild is the birthday-boy. And tomorrow, he is too. Because for him, it is always ever his Birthday, and He Will Get What He Wants. Like us, Überchild has no regard for the limitations of reality. But unlike us, his imagination is as dry and as barren as his decaying outwards. His desert is already everywhere. But it can still deepen. Überchild is a spoiled sackofshit, a rapist on a candycorn high. He is the treasured deathborn of HTML & PHP, he’s been overfed since birth on a diet of unrecycled green Javascript and flaking, graying feetfur. The feetfur of a magnetized Elon Musk. As surrealists, we can barely contain our disgust.
Comrade, you may turn that card over now. Arcanum 20? It’s about damn time.
We insurrectionists, we are the giddy ones. We are the ones who wait. Our ears, our minds open. Listening attentively for that final deafening marvelous POP. And we don’t just wait—no, no—we do everything we can in order to help that rupture along. That happy rupture. The earlier the better, of course. Everyone here knows that our time is short. But inside of us a something has been growing. A vague, a strange little outline of the something other, the futurenow. And these outlines, they are being shaped on the anvil of our authentic friendships, our authentic bonds. They are being brought into supersharpfocus. Yes, we have already started despairing of despair. Because behind the shadow of the Spectacle, there remains the butcher shop of the Real. And in some places, our blood can still flow.
lastly,
finally,
as for our surrealist revolution
it will most likely announce itself
with a colorful comic-book style
with thick lines tacky starbursts
with very silly fonts
it will be all
BOOM
KAPOW
ZAP
yes indeed
the revolution will be playful,
or it will not be at all.
– A Mormyrid